Decisive Moments, Uncertain Times is a proposal within an ongoing curatorial dialogue between Kim Simon, curator of Gallery TPW, and Jean-Paul Kelly, programmer of Trinity Square Video. The exhibition responds to Kelly’s challenge to consider the “decisive moment” in contemporary visual arts; for photography in a time of video.

If the origins of the “decisive moment” in photography lay in a consideration of the holistic narrative within a single image, …Uncertain Times revises this moment as the un-resolvable narrative. Fictional and truth-bound photographic and video works depict troubling figurative images whose narrative and historical context lay outside the frame of what is visible. …Uncertain Times wonders out loud if the contemporary “decisive moment” is embodied more by affect and the emotional implication of the viewer rather than authored narratives and documentary index. Works in the exhibition raise ethical questions about the relationship between formalism and politics, spectacle and engagement, and about image consumption and responsibility.

Parallel Programming

Public Program: Decisive Moments
Saturday, November 19, 2011, 2 pm
Join Jean-Paul Kelly, programmer of Trinity Square Video, and Kim Simon, curator of Gallery TPW, in a conversation about the decisive moment, the position of the gallery in making meaning, and the question of “now what?”